![]() ![]() Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 72, 69–73. The Brownian Movement and Stochastic Equations. The British Journal for the History of Science 26, 233–234. The case of Brownian motion: a note on Bachelier’s contribution. Atoms, Mechanics, and Probability: Ludwig Boltzmann’s Statistico-Mechanical Writings - An Exegesis. Comptes rendus de l’académie des sciences de Paris 147, 1044–1046. Le mouvement Brownien et la formule d’Einstein. ![]() Annales scientifiques de l’École normale supérieure 17, 21–86. We show how Brownian motion became a research topic for the mathematician Wiener in the 1920s, why his model was an idealization of physical experiments, what Ornstein and Uhlenbeck added to Einstein’s results, and how Wiener, Ornstein and Uhlenbeck developed in parallel contradictory theories concerning Brownian velocity. We study the works of Einstein, Smoluchowski, Langevin, Wiener, Ornstein and Uhlenbeck from 1905 to 1934 as well as experimental results, using the concept of Brownian velocity as a leading thread. In this article, we tackle the period straddling the two ‘half-histories’ just mentioned, in order to highlight continuity, to investigate the domain-shift from physics to mathematics, and to survey the enhancements of later physical theories. There is no published work telling its entire history from its discovery until today, but rather partial histories either from 1827 to Perrin’s experiments in the late 1900s, from a physicist’s point of view or from the 1920s from a mathematician’s point of view. ![]() Consequently, Brownian motion now refers to the natural phenomenon but also to the theories accounting for it. Interest in Brownian motion was shared by different communities: this phenomenon was first observed by the botanist Robert Brown in 1827, then theorised by physicists in the 1900s, and eventually modelled by mathematicians from the 1920s, while still evolving as a physical theory. ![]()
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